Wanna Be a Blogger (Part 3)

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Be an authority!
Choose something to do better than everyone else. If you are a blogger who does Joe’s Supermarket store deals & match-ups, do them better than anyone else. Create deal scenerios on top of matchups. Then when people think of shopping at Joe’s, they’ll go to you because you are the best. If you are a blogger who eats at a new restaurant everyday, take pictures, do interviews with other people at the restaurant, do everything in depth and the best possible.

Get the word out that you are the authority.
If your blog has a 5,003,003 alexa ranking, and you aren’t getting any traffic, just posting the best deals won’t get you into the number one spot on a Google search. Why? Google is going to put information from highly rated blogs/sites first *my opinion- I couldn’t find this on their webmaster site*. So until you can build followers and traffic (part 5 of this series), how do you get people to view your amazing deals?

I do (or used to, before I became to busy!) Shopko Deals & Matchups. I just did a Google search for “Shopko Deals” and here’s what pulled up:

Lot’s of “Big Blogs” come up. That is what people are going to click on – but wait! I supplied those deals to those sites so alas, when you click on a “A Thrifty Mom”, the first line says “Thanks to Cuckoo for Coupon Deals for these…” as shown below:

And same with Money Saving Mom:

If you can’t be the number one link, isn’t it better when someone clicks on that link to immediately see your link and be “the second link” clicked on!?!?

Blog traffic is 90% referral. Some people worry so much about their deals being posted all over the internet and duplicate content that no-one sees their deals. A Thrifty Mom literally copies (with my permission!) my deals word-for-word. And she is pulling up on the top of search results. It’s great for her site, and mine because I’m the “second link” people are shown. Plus, again, blog traffic is 90% referral so you want to have your link out there in as many places as possible.

Amy at Savvy Shopper Deals had a 3 hour talk with me and other bloggers discussing all the info she learned at the Casual Bloggers Conference. I knew most of it already, but one thing that stuck out to me was “work with other bloggers”. That’s how they got big; you’ve got to get links on their site and do anything you can to be in their “group”.

For example, Money Saving Mom said at the bottom of her post announcing her coupon database:

She worked with other bloggers to make something happen.

Let’s take, for an example, a blogger who posts weekly list of store sales and deals matched to coupons for Joe’s Supermarkets. Once the blogger picks their store (s) to rock and be the best at, they should partner with blogs with a low alexa rank to become the authority for their store (or whatever other type of information they want to be the authority for). Alexa over here ranks blogs by visits etc…, the lower the alexa number the better.

Back to the blogger who posts weekly deals for Joe’s Supermarkets. Here’s a list of places where that blogger may be able to get their deals published and get extra exposure for their site (if you don’t, someone else will or already has and their link will be the link that is clicked on second!) I have listed each blogs alexa rank as of 06/16/2010 determined by Alexa.com:

Those are the only ones I know of that will let you post your deals on their site – let me know if you know of any more. If a blog’s alexa rank is above 400,000 I won’t list them since it wouldn’t be worth your time to get your deals on their blog, in my opinion. Definitely worth working with them though, since as a blogger you want to work with as many fellow bloggers as possible and make as many connections as possible.

What if you are a blogger doing something besides store deals? Find a bigger blogger and write a guest post for them. Find a way to help that blogger in any way possible to get your link on their site.

Wrap-up: Become an authority and work with bigger blogs to get your information and link in as many places as possible!

Why is your alexa ranking better then blogs I’ve heard about and yours is fairly new? I wonder the same thing myself often. I don’t get as many comments on my site as A Thrifty Mom. I bet she probably gets more page views daily then me. I just happen to be married to an SEO / Web Programmer guru and I do what he says to do, and things just work out for me.

Why share these secrets? I’m a sharing kinda gal. And most of the info above is what you’d learn at Blog Her or other pricey conferences, and if you’re reading my site you are probably a fruaglista like me - you like your info free!